Thread: OCZ - Agility 2 120GB

When OCZ released the inital Agility SSD last year, it chose to use the then revolutionary Indilinx Barefoot controller to give great work. In order to bring amount under those of the Intel alternatives ruling the roost at the time OCZ joined it with somewhat slower NAND flash chips than those available in its flagship Vertex line.

Fast forward twelve months and the fastest SSDs are now related to Marvell and SandForce controllers so it should come as bit shocking that the Agility 2 is related upon the latter. As with its last incarnation the Agility 2 is targeted at a most costing conscious audience than the Vertex 2 though this time the NAND flash work is the same full speed variant used in OCZ's flagship. The two instead separate in their controller, with the Agility taking the SandForce SF-1200 chip and the Vertex using the pricier SF-1500.



In terms of actual silicon the two chips are rationally similar, though the SF-1500 has a different firmware that permits for conviniently better little file random write work. While the Vertex boasts a Random Write 4k specification of 45,000 IOPS the Agility is more than four times slower and send only 10,000 IOPs. The remaining specification is otherwise similar. In order to view if this difference resulted in a tangible decrease in real world performance we carried out a little benchmarks.

In PC Mark Vantage's hard disk exam the two drives were equivalently matched sending a little similar score of just over 16,000 marks. In our systematic read and write benchmarks the two drives also came out neck and neck 266MB/s for read and 250MB/s write. When copying files loading game levels and installing software the two drives performance equivalently once again with a change of less than 1 percent.